University Students Come Up With Multi-Gesture Wall

There have been significant advancements in touch or gesture-controlled display solutions but, in most cases, the setup involved a display with some new form of touch-tracking technology or another. Granted, there were experiments with displays that could recognize hand gestures or intuitively track multiple touch inputs, allowing varied degrees of interactivity. However, there has not been a case where such a technology was available to large form factors. Now, students from the University of Tromso, Norway, have demonstrated a solution that is as complex as it is interesting, namely a 22-megapixel display wall that uses cameras to analyze hand movements.

The students combined what they called the WallScope and Interaction spaces systems. Basically, they used 28 projectors to show an image with a resolution of 7,168 x 3,072 pixels on a large wall.

Each projector generates an image of 1024 x 768 pixels. In addition to this, floor-mounted cameras were responsible with tracking the hand gestures in 2D space, effectively simulating multi-touch input capabilities, even though touching the wall itself was not necessary. The team then took a 13.3-gigapixel image of Tromso and made a video demonstration showing smooth and accurate control, with possible operations being zooming in and out or moving the picture itself around, all with simple hand movements.

Of course, the setup isn't exactly the most easily applicable. In order to reach the intended result, the team used a 30-node display cluster, out of which 28 handled the actual graphics and the other two were employed for whatever minor tasks were required.

This says a lot about just how much processing power such an installment would take. Still, despite its current inapplicability, the concept is at least interesting and, most importantly, functional, which is a lot for such a large form factor.

There is no knowing when, if ever, humanity will discover a use for display walls.